On the occasion of Friendship Day (the first Sunday of August) we invited readers to share how they met their best friend. Here we present the final batch of responses readers sent in...
My best buddy is Shreyas.
We were together in engineering college. Right from the first year and even the first semester, he would always be surrounded by girls, thanks to his sense of humour. And because of his friendly nature, all the seniors were his friends too.
Time flew by and in the second year, we (fortunately) joined coaching classes for applied thermodynamics. The professor was so boring that after the first lecture, we always bunked his class. But we could not go home so we would sit at the beach for hours together and that is when our friendship just became deeper.
It was 2002 when our friendship began and I am proud of his every achievement so far. He does everything so perfectly -- be it drawing, work, projects, flirting (he is loyal to his wife to the core) and making new friends. Most importantly he knows the perfect way of keeping friendship alive.
You are the best buddy, always be the way you are and keep rocking!
-- Vaibhav Wankhade
One day I could not catch my train to reach home (I travel 54 km to work and back) and was waiting for another train that was scheduled to arrive in half-an-hour. Suddenly I heard a mild voice that asked me about a similar situation they found themselves in.
She was to travel to the same destination as I and asked what time the next train would arrive. I told her and we wnet our own way. But in the following days, we would meet and small talk turned into long conversations.
This is how I met my friend who is now my best friend.
-- DB Chhetri
The number had been on my phone for a while now, but whose was it? I knew it was a girl, I knew her name, what she did and where she was, so I called her. I must have spoken to at least three or four voices, all of them blasting me like there was no mercy in this world.
Two days later I got a call; one of those four voices spoke to me. She told me her name was Anamika, which I knew was a lie and I told her my name was Kumar which she probably thought was my full name. She said she was sorry that her friends were rude to me. Protective friends, I thought. But we spoke for quite a while that day and when we hung up I knew both of us were smiling.
I called her back a day after, this time again she wasn't alone. I didn't call her after that and neither did I answer her calls, though there weren't too many of them.
One night I finally answered her call, more because I was drunk. I told her my name, she didn't like it; she told me hers and I confessed I was only a flirt trying to find a friend when I called her. She was angry and terribly upset, she did not believe people called up strangers to make friends. She hung up; so much for my being truthful.
We did not speak for a week before she called me up.
She had some exam the next day and she just said, "Wake me up after an hour, okay mister," and hung up. I had a by Erich Segal in my hands. The next morning when I went to bed, I had finished the book, woken her up six times through the night and it was 6 am. She called me in the evening and said "You are a good guy" but added after a pause "sometimes".
The following week, I had a terrible ulcer and I was almost crying in pain when she called me. To this day she doesn't know why she cried that day over the phone. Our calls were more frequent in the days that followed and I bore the brunt because she was still at college and I was working .When I did not call her for a few days, she would call me up only to tell me what a 'miser' I was.
Our birthdays fall a day apart and that year I sent her a box of chocolates and had my drunken friends sing her 'Happy Birthday' over the phone. She cried, again but not before she said "Thank you, flirt".
I met her two months later at an old fort near her college, a place near my home town, wearing a black Tshirt, she loved black. She was huge (she was not pretty at first sight) and she had two of her beautiful protective friends with her. She didn't like me either I guess, because she said "Who do you think you are, the angry young man? Stop frowning at me and and drooling at them."
She went to work a few months later at a hospital in a neighbouring state; our calls became less frequent, though we spoke at least once a week. Once, I was travelling by a train that was passing through her enighbourhood. She was at the station in the middle of the night smiling; standing beside a frowning, shivering-out-of-cold friend.
Railway stations have since become our only rendezvous, I only saw her every time she left home or when she was at her college to get some 'papers'. She soon left to live with her parents in Uttar Pradesh.
She still calls me up -- when she is angry, when she is scared, when her brother is back from the US, when her back hurts, when she wants to cry, when she wants to laugh, when she has seen someone looks like 'the Flirt' or simply because she thought she should disturb Mr Kumar.
We are both married now, not to each other but little has changed since.
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